Eyes on the farm, day and night
Ostrich Land Ontario raises ostriches and opens the farm to visitors. The owners run it themselves, with the office computers, the ticketing and the day to day admin sitting on top of everything else a farm demands. They came to us for desktop support and then had us put in a security camera system.
Where they started
The farm computers had grown the way they do: a mix of machines, software installed by whoever needed it that week and files kept wherever they landed. Backups were a good intention. The farm sits on a large property with visitors coming and going in season and long stretches where nobody is around. The owners wanted to know what was happening on the property when they were not standing in it.
Desktop support
We started with the computers. Each machine was cleaned up, patched and set to update itself, with a password manager, disk encryption and a second step on the accounts that matter. Files moved to one shared place that backs up on a schedule, with a copy kept off the farm, and we restore from those backups now and then to prove they work.
The camera system
Cameras went up around the grounds, the entrance and the store, wired back to a recorder on the farm running open source software. Footage stays on the property. The recorder picks out people and animals rather than every moving branch, and sends a short clip to the owners' phones when something turns up. It keeps recording if the internet drops.
Looking after it
Cameras, recorder and the office machines are monitored. If a camera goes dark or a disk starts using more space than expected, we see it first. Camera firmware is kept current and the system is reachable from outside only through an encrypted tunnel, with no camera login on the open internet.
Today
The owners check the farm from their phones and have someone to call for anything technical, without staff on payroll for it. The property is watched and the computers just work.
We had a need for desktop, video surveillance and data backup support for our business. Viscous Bits has helped us in many ways, having access to their knowledge is like having an IT Support team without having to pay for the cost of keeping employees on site.
Stack
Windows, Linux, Frigate, PoE IP cameras, WireGuard, encrypted offsite backups, Prometheus and Grafana